The War of the Worlds: Book 1, Chapter 2 Summary & Analysis

Early one morning, what seems to many to be “an ordinary falling star” streaks across the sky, leaving behind a glowing streak of green light. Ogilvy sees this and believes it to be a meteorite. Estimating that it  landed in the common between Horsell, Ottershaw, and Woking, he rushes out of his house to find it. When he comes upon the object, he sees that it has made a massive hole in the earth and that it is a cylinder of some sort. The Thing, as the narrator calls it, is quite large and covered in a scaly substance that is too hot to touch or approach. From inside, Ogilvy can hear faint sounds, but he attributes them to the “unequal cooling” of the cylinder’s surface. 

The only person in Horsell Common, Ogilvy studies the Thing. As it cools, its outer layer begins to flake off, and soon the oblong end sticking into the air starts to rotate. The cylinder, Ogilvy realizes, is unscrewing. “Good heavens!” he cries. “There’s a man in it—men in it! Half roasted to death! Trying to escape!” Finally, he remembers the flashes from Mars and immediately connects the two things in his mind. He rushes toward the Thing, excited by the idea that men might be inside, but is forced to stop because of the immense heat radiating from the cylinder. Turning, he climbs out of the cratered pit made by the Thing and runs toward Woking. On the way, he passes a wagoner, but when he tries to tell the man what he’s seen, he sounds beside himself and looks disheveled, having lost his hat in the pit. The wagoner drives on.

As he rushes on, Ogilvy encounters a bartender closing up his pub. Like the wagoner, though, the man thinks Ogilvy is crazy and even tries to lock him inside the taproom. Escaping, the astronomer finally finds a London journalist named Henderson, who agrees to accompany him back to the pit. When the two men arrive, the sounds from within the cylinder have stopped, but the top has screwed off enough so that a silver threading is visible, air rushing through the newly opened space. Henderson and Ogilvy approach, rapping against the Thing but receiving no response. They then rush back toward town, where Henderson sends a telegraph to London. “The newspaper articles had prepared men’s minds for the reception of the idea,” the narrator writes. He notes that by eight in the morning, a group of people have set out to see the “dead men from Mars.”